Boricua Passport

By J. L. Torres

BORICUA PASSPORT evokes the complex in-betweeness that represents the contemporary Puerto Rican condition as filtered through the prism of poet J.L. Torres’ life experience. For many Puerto Ricans the sense of being unhomed—having a homeland but not really feeling at home anywhere—is a real lived experience determined by a persisting and unsettled colonial condition. In BORICUA PASSPORT, Torres, screams, shouts, rejoices, celebrates, tickles and challenges with a poetry sprinkled with Spanish/Spanglish that is immediate and urgent. It’s your passport into a world simultaneously real and imaginary, one most people don’t even know exists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: 2Leaf Press
• Release date: May 12, 2014
• ISBN: 9781940939209

J. L. Torres

J. L. Torres is the author of The Family Terrorist and Other Stories; a novel, The Accidental Native; and the collection of poetry, Boricua Passport. He has published stories and poems in numerous journals and magazines, including the North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Eckleburg Review, Puerto del Sol, Las Americas Review, and the anthology Growing Up Latino. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. Torres is a professor of English at SUNY Plattsburgh. Born in Puerto Rico, raised in the South Bronx, he lives in Plattsburgh, New York.

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BORICUA PASSPORT

J.L. Torres’ poems draw a line in the sand from the blue green crystal clear agua buenas of Puerto Rico to the blue salsa funk of the Boogie Down. He takes us Salsa dancing through the rhythms of his words, their rich, visceral, viscous texture and specificity to the deep down soulscapes of each image-driven memory of what it means to be a Rican constructing a reality from the belly of that which devours dreams. You don’t need a passport to be transported to the world(s) in the words of Torres’ verse — just your heart and head and an imagination scopic and distended as the universe.

— Tony Medina, Poet, Professor, Activist, author of Broke Baroque (2leaf Press, 2013)

If you are a Boricua from the Bronx, you will delight in a multi-sensory landscape that takes back a beauty often obscured by the hard times, and denied by those who know the Bronx only as an ugly rumor. You will recognize the sights and aromas; you will know the people. Some poems might make you angry, others will make you recall your own experiences. Those who fear and revile our beautiful and complex Bronx, might want to hop a train after reading this collection.

— Magadalena Gomez, Poet and Playwright, Co-founder and Artisitic Director of Teatro V!da

"I bless J.L.Torres for writing Boricua Passport. This collection of poems took me back to my old neighborhood. Thank you Torres for writing about the bodega and cuchifritos. I can hear the plane in Departures stumbling in the air pass the St. Mary’s Projects and crashing in the nearby park. Torres’ poetry kisses my ears and lips. To be Puerto Rican is to write from the center of love embracing the complexity of identity. To be Nuyorican is to continue moving and transforming the world. Every imagination requires a passport. Torres stamps my heart with words."

— E. Ethelbert Miller, Award-winning Poet and Literary Activist

Like his mother, who wrote her history on every grain of rice, Torres marks the story of his journey through cultural displacement with these poems. The ever shifting notion of home, the ever evolving narrative of identity, emerge from poems like Doña Vista, Legacy, To White Editors, and Letrina.

Calling Home: Praise Songs and Incantations

Against Disneyfied caricatures of Boricua mobility, J.L.Torres proposes a mobilization of memory, a mapping of his/our varied turfs: the asphalt borderlands of the South Bronx, the home(is)land of Puerto Rico, far upstate and its Carajo counties, and most of all the unincorporated territories of the soul and body. This is not your abuelita’s poetry, except that it is--tu sabes? In the spirit of Rev. Pedro Pietri, Torres seeks out the location of this nothingness where we all scrawl our own passports in in(di)visible ink. Watch /here/ and /there/ blur! This /Boricua Passport/ has your name.

— Urayoán Noel, Poet and Scholar, author of Los días porosos (Catafixia Editorial, 2012)

"In Boricua Passport, J.L. Torres guides his reader through a morphing homeland; from paradise to housing projects, from sand-filled island beaches to summer tarred city rooftops. The scape of the land he calls home mutates before your eyes. Torres’ homeland is found in his suffering mother, his place of birth is the person who is his father. His readers experience the transformation of a people. Grief caused by family separation, the horrific life of slavery, the brutal working life in the fields, the alienation of one’s identity, is transformed anew with vitality and pride. In the end, we arrive back home to our abuela and the bata. In the end, the final homeland is the one found in one another for in our mutual dance lies the resurrection of our nation."

—Nancy Mercado, PhD, Writer, Editor